The issue at hand.

YOU MIGHT SAY religion bashing is taking a beating these days. On the one hand evolutionary psychologists tell us that belief in God is hardwired and studies show it can be beneficial to your health. Then you have the right-wing Christians who portray themselves over and over as victims of vicious secular attacks that threaten their religious freedom. (See this issue's "Church & State" column by the inimitable Rob Boston. Consider too the address by former Miss California Carrie Prejean to an adoring crowd at the recent Values Voters Summit in Washington, DC. Prejean, an evangelical Christian who claims she was dethroned for answering honestly that she's opposed to gay marriage, essentially said, through her tears, that liberals' intolerance of her intolerance was shockingly mean and, well, intolerant.) Meanwhile, moderate believers and nonbelievers alike are getting fed up with the New Atheists, saying their outspoken criticism of religion is rude and counterproductive.

The arguments from humanists who don't like the New Atheist approach are often similar. They say that moderate church-going liberals--those who don't want intelligent design taught in science classes, who acknowledge expert opinion on climate change, and who support reproductive freedom and marriage equality--should be treated as allies on these and other issues of mutual concern. My first response is that it's not so easy to bundle people's positions; make your way down that list of issues and you find more and more "moderate" theists falling away. (I personally know otherwise liberal Christians who contend that homosexuality is a sin and think marriage should remain between a man and a woman). Secondly, if you're going to employ the language of battle and identify liberals of faith as allies, then you'd better be prepared to also identify who the enemy is and what battle you're fighting.

Take the environment. A climate-change bill that would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020 is moving through the Senate and supporters are hoping a vote might take place before the 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Attending that conference to present what he calls "another view" is global-warming skeptic Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), a self-proclaimed "one-man truth squad" and the ranking minority member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. In late September, on C-Span's Washington Journal, Inhofe opined: "God's still up there. We're going through these cycles.... I really believe that a lot of people are in denial who want to hang their hat on [what] they believe is a fact, that man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, are causing global warming. The science really isn't there." By this logic, why even look for the science when you've got the supernatural? Such blind adherence to a divine creator--to the detriment of humans and all life on Earth--is the enemy, and the New Atheists (whether you like their horsemen's trot or not) are mounted and ready to charge it.

Adlai Stevenson once said, "It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse." The issue at hand celebrates the 2009 Humanist of the Year, PZ Myers, biologist and blogger extraordinaire. Myers is neither the type to look funny on a horse, nor one to care even if he did. He is a compassionate comrade, a keen scientist, and a colorful critic. We should welcome such riders in our midst.